(DCNF)—A Pakistani marketplace known for selling weapons to interested buyers, including terrorists, bustled with activity in the immediate aftermath of the Biden administration’s botched pullout from Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported Monday.
The market in Darra Adamkhel, near Peshawar, Pakistan, saw its busiest days in recent memory in the wake of the chaotic 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after two decades at war as leftover American military gear sold like hotcakes, the Post reported. Years later, American machine guns, rifles and night vision goggles are turning up in the hands of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) and Pakistani Baloch separatist fighters seeking to destabilize the nuclear-armed Pakistani government.
“The market was flooded with American weapons,” a man named Raz Muhammad told the Post. “Demand was high,” noted high-ranking TTP terrorist Qari Shuaib Bajauri, who also told the Post his men were able to take advantage of lower prices caused by the glut of American gear hitting the markets.
“The presence of U.S. advance weapons … has been an issue of profound concern for the safety and security of Pakistan,” the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said in a January statement. Michael Kugelman, an expert on South Asia, believes that the current conditions in Pakistan present risks that the nuclear-armed country could end up “falling back into that terrible period between 2009 and 2014, when the country was a major magnet for terrorism,” he told the Post.
Indeed, American military gear finding its way to Pakistani terrorists is making it more difficult for the Pakistani authorities to keep insurgent groups in check, according to the Post.
In May 2024, Pakistani officials showed the Post more than 60 weapons that were recovered from captured or killed fighters that the U.S. government previously gave to Afghan forces. The U.S. Army and Department of Defense (DoD) subsequently confirmed to the Post that the U.S. originally provided the weapons to Afghan forces during the American war in the country.
At least two of the rifles used by Baloch militants in a bloody March attack against a passenger train in Pakistan were once given to Afghan forces by the U.S., according to the Post. Other items shown to the Post included large quantities of ammunition and U.S. body armor.
Weapons bazaars along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region where arms dealers and buyers have long done business were teeming with activity in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan under the Biden administration, according to the Post. During the Afghanistan pullout, the U.S. abandoned an estimated $7 billion worth of military equipment behind, including enough rifles to arm the entire U.S. Marine Corps and enough sets of night-vision goggles to equip the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
For its part, the federal government contends that the weapons it provided to the Afghan government were the property and responsibility of the Afghans once they changed hands.
“Once transferred to the Afghan government, they were the Afghan government’s property and its responsibility,” a senior defense official told the Post. The equipment that Pakistani officials have recovered “comprise a minuscule portion of the total we bought for the Afghans over more than a decade,” the official added.
Militant groups have learned to use the advanced gear to make their attacks against government forces more precise and lethal, and government forces have also seen their technical advantage over insurgents decrease over time, according to the Post.
“The battle has become much more dangerous,” Zaheer Hassan, a major in the Pakistani army who was injured in an attack last year, told the Post.
President Donald Trump railed against the Biden administration’s chaotic Afghanistan pullout on the campaign trail, frequently referring to the episode as an embarrassment to the U.S. Trump has also signaled that he would like to recoup the abandoned gear, whether by leveraging aid dollars or by some other means, according to the Post.
“The Biden administration left the weapons there, and we believe the U.S. should do something about it — whether they buy them from the Afghan Taliban or do something else,” a Pakistani Foreign Ministry official told the Post, which granted the official anonymity to speak freely.
The Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
